Awards:
Young Artist Award for best young actor in a motion picture comedy, for
Can't Buy Me Love
, 1988.

Sidelights

For awhile it looked like Patrick Dempsey would never amount to much more
than a distant memory as one of yesterday's forgotten teen idols.
During the late 1980s Dempsey graced the pages of
Tiger Beat
magazine and drew teenage audiences to theaters playing sophomoric,
underdog boys in a series of hits that included 1987's
Can't Buy Me Love
and 1989's
Loverboy.
In the 1990s Dempsey struggled to find breakthrough roles and faded from
view. He returned with a matured vengeance in 2002's
Sweet Home Alabama
, opposite Reese Witherspoon. In 2005, Dempsey earned a role as Dr. Derek
Shepherd on ABC's doctor drama
Grey's Anatomy.
Thanks in part to Dempsey's winsome onscreen chemistry, the show
became an instant hit and returned Dempsey
to pinup status. Older, more muscular and mature, Dempsey was named to
TV Guide
's list of the 50 sexiest men on television.

The youngest of three children, Dempsey was born in 1966 in the rural
Maine town of Lewiston. His father, William, sold insurance and his
mother, Amanda, worked as a secretary. The Dempsey family was Catholic. As
such, Dempsey attended St. Dominic's Regional High School, as well
as Buck-field High. As a child Dempsey struggled academically, leaving
teachers to conclude he was lazy. In seventh grade, however, Dempsey was
diagnosed with dyslexia. The experience made Dempsey feel like an outsider
and he turned to skiing as a diversion for his loneliness. He was good
enough to win a state downhill championship. Over time—and in a
roundabout way—Dempsey's love for skiing led him off the
slopes and onto the stage.

As a young adolescent, Dempsey felt driven to perfect his skiing and often
tuned into
Wide World of Sports
to study the pros. One day the show featured a ski champ who demonstrated
unicycle riding, claiming it improved his skills. Dempsey had to try it,
too. Once he mastered the unicycle, juggling seemed like a natural
progression. "Learning how to juggle changed my life, "
Dempsey told the
New York Times
' Lawrence Van Gelder. "It gave me a purpose. It led me
toward performance."

At 15, Dempsey won second place in the junior division of the
International Jugglers' Competition. He added magic and puppetry to
his repertoire and developed his own act, performing locally. In the early
1980s Dempsey's act caught the attention of the Maine Acting
Company and he was cast in its summer production of
On Golden Pond
playing Billy, a teenage boy forced to spend the summer with an aging
couple. Dempsey traveled to New York during the summer of 1983 to compete
in a talent competition and snagged an agent. Within months he earned a
role in a San Francisco production of Harvey Fierstein's Tony
Award-winning play
Torch Song Trilogy.
Just 17, Dempsey quit school.

Spending several months onstage with professional actors convinced Dempsey
that he did not want to attend college or acting school. "I think
it's better to learn from actors who are working than study with
actors who aren't working, " he told the
Washington Post
's Megan Rosenfeld. Next, he spent a year touring in the leading
role of Eugene Jerome in Neil Simon's coming-of-age comedy
Brighton Beach Memoirs.
In 1985, Dempsey made his first film appearance in
Heaven Help Us
and in 1987 scored a starring role in
Meatballs III.
Success followed with 1987's teen cult-classic
Can't Buy Me Love
, which featured Dempsey as a high school geek who tries to improve his
status by paying a cheerleader to be his girlfriend. Dempsey followed with
1989's
Loverboy
, where he played a pizza delivery boy who offered customers more than
just pizza.

At the age of 21, Dempsey married his 48-year-old manager, Rocky Parker.
"I was a bit of a Freudian nightmare at the time, " he
admitted to
TV Guide
's Steve Pond. "Those type of relationships are fun and
exciting and sort of rebellious, but they just don't work
out." Dempsey and Parker divorced in 1993, about the time his
career began to stall. For the next decade Dempsey struggled to convince
directors he had matured as an actor capable of moving beyond his earlier,
juvenile roles. In 1994 Dempsey met then-salon owner Jillian Fink at her
Los Angeles hair salon. After three years of haircuts they finally started
dating and married in 1999. Meanwhile, Dempsey, with his career in the
dumps, returned home to Maine, where he bought and restored a farm.

Once Dempsey relaxed, the roles started coming and he was able to project
a more confident, mature person onscreen. In 2000 Dempsey earned a
recurring role as Sela Ward's schizophrenic brother on the ABC
drama
Once and Again
and earned a 2001 Emmy nomination for his performance. He also made
repeated appearances on shows like
Will & Grace
and
The Practice.
Dempsey's career revived on the big screen as well in
2000's
Scream 3
and 2002's
Sweet Home Alabama.

In 2005
Grey's Anatomy
, a pilot in the waiting, hit the television lineup as a midseason
replacement. The show centers around a set of surgical interns at a
fictional Seattle hospital. One key character is Meredith Grey, played by
Ellen Pompeo, a first-year intern who has a one-night stand with a
stranger at a party the night before she begins her internship. When she
shows up at the hospital, she discovers that the man she shared a bed with
is her supervisor, surgeon Derek Shepherd, played by Dempsey. The show
became an unexpected hit, drawing an average of 17 million viewers, making
it the most-watched new midseason drama since 1993's
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

The show's success catapulted Dempsey back into heartthrob status.
In 2005
TV Guide
named Dempsey one of the 50 hottest men on television. Speaking in that
issue of
TV Guide
, co-star Pompeo summed up Dempsey's allure this way: "Dr.
Mc-Dreamy,
that's what I call Patrick's character, Derek Shepherd.
He's gorgeous, he's got a great body, and he's got
[fantastic] hair."

As an actor who has been around the block, Dempsey is taking success in
stride these days. He told
TV Guide
's Pond that following the success of
Grey's Anatomy
, people kept asking him if he was excited. "And it's funny,
[because] mostly it's just a big sigh of relief that now I have
some opportunities. I don't need to be a huge superstar."